Benjamin and the new -Reply

[WARREN GOLDSTEIN]

Dear Giles Peaker,

I just wanted to make some remarks on your comments

>>> Giles Peaker <G.Peaker@derby.ac.uk> 05/07/96 11:56am >>>

>With regard to Benjamin and the 'New'. This is a Benjaminian category,
>inflected by Nietzsche.  I found Susan Buck-Morss' book _The
>Dialectics of Seeing_ to be really helpful and good as a reading of
>Benjamin on this topic.  She brings out the real complexity of Benjamin's
>conception of the new, which is simultaneously redemptive and the
>image of an "eternally recurrent" Hell.

If Benjamin is basing his conception of the new off of Nietzsche's "die
ewige Wiederkehr", then what is new is the return to something old.

>I do find a certainly difficulty in her attempt to anchor allegory (to
>retrieve it from the subjective and arbitrary) in order to sustain the
>dialectical image as a materialist conception. This anchoring attempt
>hinges on the account of the Kabbalah, which is appropriately in the
>centre of the book. This reinstates the metaphysical and nonsubjective 
>'experience', which is called theological in the earlier Benjamin. 

Benjamin concept of allegory is anchored in the Trauerspiel book.  The
problem is in the transition from allegorical images in his early works to
dialectical images in the later works (on Baudelaire) which are also
allegorical.  A shift occurs from an emphasis on language and a
forbidding of images to dialectical images.  Rolf Tiedeman observes that
Benjamin does not use dialectical images in any systematic manner (On
Walter Benjamin, p. 284)  Yet,  I would argue that it is possible to
systematize it.  He tends to use it as dialectical images of the past (the
Flaneur and the Prostitute in the Passagenwerk) which through
remembrance (Eingedenken) flash up into the present.  His concept of
experience which early on attempt to ground metaphysics becomes later
psychological.  One of the problems is that Benjamin's knowledge of the
Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism was second hand (through the works
of Hamann, Scholem, Buber, Rosenzweig, Cohen) 

>The differences between tradition and modernity are primarily the
>differences between two modes of experience, which have a
>temporality at their root. Each temporality is also a mode of relation to
>the divine, which has no place in the historical world. 

Benjamin's two modes of experience are first, in the essay on
experience an attempt to ground theological experience.  He does this
later through the use of psychology (in the second Baudelaire essay). 
However, I would argue that both are historical.  In the early essay, he
attempts to explain how metaphysical experience is possible.  In the
later, it is an attempt to anchor dialectical images (which are historical
images) in social psychological experience.

>Benjamin is more concerned with a recovery of the modes of tradition
>than he is with a specifically modern intimation of redemption (again the
>1934 Kafka essay).

I think this depends on which writings you are referring to.  While this is
the case in the first Baudelaire work, I do not think it holds true for his
early works or for the theses.

>Even 'One Way Street' (1923-8) shifts the privileged and
>unproblematised position of the critic as 'receiver' of truth directly from
>the Trauerspiel to the streets of 1920s Berlin. Here the relationship of
>the critic to truth is as ahistorical as the materials through which he
>attempts to delineate those truths are historical. 

Once again, I do not understand how you can argue that One-Way
Street is ahistorical.  I view it as an urban sociology of Berlin at the turn
of the century like the Passagenwerk is an urban sociology of Paris in
the Nineteenth century.  But I do think that One Way Street is transitional,
a bridge from the Trauerspiel book (which nevertheless does have
historical and dialectical elements- although certainly not materialist) to
the later historical materialist writings.  One of my points of confusion is
the jumping backing and forth between theological and materialist
elements.  The shifts from the work on Kafka to Baudelaire and then
back to the Theses appears to be a kind of intellectual schizophrenia. 
One the one hand, the theses are clearly grounded in the earlier work. 
But on the other hand, the position he takes- the explicit mixing of
materialist and theological elements is only found in the Kraus essay
written several years earlier (1931).  I can understand the historical
conditions which led him to do this in the theses but then why not
between 1931-1940?

Sincerely,

Warren Goldstein